Hello everyone
I have been reading about QID emoji and what is proposed.
At present I have a question to which I cannot find the answer.
Is the QID emoji format, if approved by the Unicode Technical Committee
going to be sent to the ISO/IEC 10646 committee for consideration by
that committee?
As the QID emoji format is in a Unicode Technical Standard and does not
include the encoding of any new _atomic_ characters, I am concerned that
the answer to the above question may well be along the lines of "No"
maybe with some reasoning as to why not.
Yet will a QID emoji essentially be _de facto_ a character even if not
_de jure_ a character?
For a QID emoji will not just be "markup using existing characters from
the ISO/IEC 10646 standard that is synchronized with Unicode", such as
would be a markup that anyone could devise for use in his or her
research and experimentation or indeed some public use, it will be a
Unicode Inc. endorsed "whatever" that is very closely linked to The
Unicode Standard even if not deemed to be part of it.
As I understand the situation, in some countries people take no (formal)
notice as such of The Unicode Standard but rely solely on ISO/IEC 10646.
Often this may well present no practical problems in information
technology and its applications because the two standards are
synchronized each with the other.
Yet if QID emoji are implemented by Unicode Inc. without also being
implemented by ISO/IEC 10646 then that could lead to future problems,
notwithstanding any _de jure_ situation that QID emoji are not
characters, because they will be much more than Private Use characters
yet less than characters that are in ISO/IEC 10646.
I am in favour of the encoding of the QID emoji mechanism and its
practical application. However I wonder about what are the consequences
for interoperability and communication if QID emoji become used - maybe
quite widely - and yet the tag sequences are not discernable in meaning
from ISO/IEC 10646 or any related ISO/IEC documents.
William Overington
Wednesday 30 October 2019
